Eric Musselman once had a member of his staff dress up as the school’s wolf mascot and dribble two basketballs simultaneously for 3 hours at a local mall to drum up support for his Nevada men’s basketball team.

He has had assistant coaches fan out across campus on game days, passing out fliers, and brought in a juggler on a unicycle to entertain fans before tip-off.

The most important step in building a winning college basketball program, he said, is bringing in talented players. And Nevada has had several over the past three seasons while moving to the top of the Mountain West.

But creating an exciting atmosphere for them to play in helps, too. It’s how you recruit the next batch of great players. The Wolf Pack was playing Boise State for first place in the Mountain West, in front of a near-sellout crowd of 11,164 two weeks ago, when Jalen Harris made an official recruiting visit to the school.

Friday, the talented transfer from Louisiana Tech formally signed with the program, choosing the Wolf Pack over offers from Oklahoma State, Tulsa and Stephen F. Austin. The atmosphere inside the 11,536-seat Lawlor Events Center during that win over Boise State, he told the Reno Gazette Journal, played a significant role in his decision.

Nevada (19-4, 8-1 Mountain West), which faces CSU (10-14, 3-8) on Saturday night at Moby Arena, is drawing an average of 8,722 fans for its home games this season, a 58 percent increase from the 5,497 the Wolf Pack drew in 2014-15, its final season under former coach David Carter.

“We tried to do outside-the-box stuff to get the attendance where it’s been,” Musselman said earlier this week. “To have coaches passing out fliers all over campus on game day? It’s not something that everyone wakes up in the morning, saying, ‘Hey, this is awesome!’

“It’s something that you have to do, though, to get your program to a level that you’re comfortable with, and that does help in recruiting and everything else.”

Musselman, 53, knows all about the "everything else."

He was the “general manager, head coach, CEO and marketer” of teams he coached in pro basketball’s minor leagues both before and after seven seasons on an NBA bench, including two as head coach of the Golden State Warriors and one with the Sacramento Kings. His father, Bill, coached professionally for 15 seasons, too, spending time in the NBA as well as the American, Continental and World basketball associations.

The key to success in the college game, he knows, is recruiting. Just like the pros, you can’t win if you don’t have the players you need to be successful.

And Musselman has fared well in that area.

He got Lindsey Drew, who originally had committed to Arizona State, and Cameron Oliver, who had committed to Oregon State, to instead sign with Nevada coming out of high school and played the two freshmen extensively in 2015-16. He signed two transfers, as well, who had to sit out that first year while Nevada went 24-14 and won the College Basketball Invitational just a year after going 9-20 under former coach David Carter.

Those transfers – forward Jordan Caroline from Southern Illinois and guard Marcus Marshall from Missouri State – played key roles last year as the Wolf Pack went 28-7 overall and 14-4 in the MW, winning both the regular season and conference tournament titles and advancing to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 11 years.

Four more transfers who sat out last year are significant contributors this year – starters Caleb and Cody Martin from North Carolina State and Kendall Stephens from Purdue, all 6-foot-7 forwards, and reserve guard Hallice Cooke from Iowa State.

And four more transfers are sitting out this year – 6-7 forward Tre’Shawn Thurman from Nebraska-Omaha and guards Corey Henson from Wagner, Nisre Zouzoua from Bryant and Jazz Johnson from Portland.

“What we’ve lacked in depth has provided us a way to continue to get better the following year,” Musselman said. “And it’s the same thing this year. We feel like we have four guys sitting out that are all going to have a big impact next year in the Mountain West, but we don’t have a lot of depth.

“When you take over a nine-win program, you’re going to have some holes, and what we’ve done is we’ve said, ‘Hey, we’re not going to be a deep team in years 1, 2 and 3. And then next year, we’ll have a lot more depth.”

Three of the four years, the Wolf Pack has also signed two players out of high school, as they did again last fall.

“We feel like it’s been a mix or a blend of transfers as well as incoming freshmen and then when you get the players that are sitting out, you’ve got to really work and develop them and improve areas of their game that might be lacking,” he said.

They’ve got to be ready to play right away that next season, he said, so they can carry the load while you bring the freshmen up to speed.

So far, so good.

Musselman has the Wolf Pack poised to win a second straight MW title this season and in the hunt for an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament if they don’t win the conference tournament again. A double-overtime loss last week at Wyoming knocked Nevada out of the Top 25, but the Wolf Pack was No. 15 Friday in the NCAA’s RPI and projected as a No. 8 seed Thursday in ESPN analyst Joe Lunardi’s latest projected NCAA tournament bracket.

“He does an excellent job,” Colorado State University coach Larry Eustachy said earlier in the week, saying he became good friends with Musselman when the Nevada coach spent a week with him at Southern Mississippi at the start of the 2007-08 season.

Musselman had been fired by the Sacramento Kings a few months earlier after going 33-49 in his only season there. He went 75-89 in two seasons as the Golden State Warriors coach from 2002-04.

“When he had the opportunity to go to San Diego (Musselman’s alma mater) or there, I told him Nevada’s a gold mine,” said Eustachy, whose parents graduated from Nevada. “You win a little bit there, and they pack the place. … It’s a place you can turn around right away.”

It’s a lot different coaching college basketball than coaching professionally, said Musselman, whose record at Nevada is 71-25. You have to wear a lot of different hats, all at the same time. You have to recruit year-round, prepare players for life after basketball, make sure they stay on top of their academic work and market your program to put fans in the stands.

Three years as a college assistant, two at Arizona State and one at LSU, and three years as a college basketball TV analyst, he said, were every bit as important to his success as his 23 seasons coaching at the professional level.

“I had six years of sitting back, evaluating, and then when I did get my opportunity, I felt like I was overly prepared, due to having great patience and then having a plan,” he said. “And the plan was to try to figure out how we could win quickly and then also sustain it.

“In other words, we didn’t want to tell our fan base that in Year 3 or 4 we were going to be really good; we wanted to try to improve incrementally each year, but also be competitive right out of the gate.”